Documents Show UK Post-WWII Dilemma Over Jewish Refugees

[Purveyor]

(05-04) 16:05 PDT LONDON, United Kingdom (AP) --

Documents released Monday show how the British government tried to send thousands of Palestine-bound Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide back to postwar Germany without inflaming world opinion.

Could it be done? The answer was no. It was just two years after the end of the war and the world was outraged by the systematic murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis in what became known as the Holocaust.

Despite the best efforts of early spin doctors to portray the move in the most sympathetic light, the decision to turn away the more than 4,500 Jews on board the Exodus refugee ship turned into a humanitarian and public relations debacle for Britain.

The story is detailed in more than 400 pages of formerly secret documents at Britain's National Archives made available to the public on Monday.

The Jews aboard the Exodus were trying to enter Palestine illegally during the tumultuous months in 1947 before the United Nations voted to create a Jewish homeland in part of Palestine.

Britain was still governing Palestine and the British government felt it had to keep the immigrants out to preserve the demographic balance between Arab and Jew. But Britain did not have a safe place to send the Jews from the Exodus, who were placed on three smaller British steamers.

After much agonizing, the British concluded that the only place they could send the Jews was to the British-controlled zone of postwar Germany, where the Jews could be placed in camps and screened for extremists.

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/05/04/international/i160531D23.DTL

[aquart]

1. Exodus by Leon Uris. BIG bestseller.

Exodus starring Paul Newman, blockbuster movie.

And the PBS documentary on it, too, but I forget what it was called.

Before you were born?